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Nov. 20th, 2003 04:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionIt's 4:05 AM. Let's talk about movies.
When I was about 16 I decided movies were the best thing in the world and set about seeing the best ones. I bought that year's copy of Leonard Maltin's Film and Video Guide and rented anything he gave a four star rating to (these numbered 429 at the time), as well as anything whose capsule description made it unmissable.
The Guide: The tastes of Maltin and his staff run toward older stuff, especially 1940s movies. A good rule of thumb is to subtract half a star from anything before 1960, actually. Among the four-stars there are comparative duds but I have to say every single one I saw was worth the seeing (except 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois). The Guide reviewers don't single out anything as the best film yet made, but I remember the rhetoric of praise being highest-pitched for Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Great Expectations (1946) and Modern Times. Further trivia: Alfred Hitchcock directed the most four-star films (Psycho + Foreign Correspondent + Rebecca + North by Northwest + Strangers on a Train + The Lady Vanishes + The 39 Steps + Vertigo + Rear Window = 9); his closest competitors were Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal + Wild Strawberries + Smiles of a Summer Night + Scenes from a Marriage + Fanny and Alexander + memory fails = 6?), Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows + Jules et Jim + Two Sisters + Small Change + Shoot the Piano Player + a 400 Blows sequel whose title escapes me = 6) and Steven Spielberg (E.T. + Jaws + Close Encounters of the Third Kind + Raiders of the Lost Ark + Schindler's List = 5); the highest directorial average goes to the guy who directed Zero pour Conduit and L'Atalante and then dropped dead; the former is also the shortest on the list. The longest was Rainer Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a fifteen-hour West German television miniseries, quite awful on the whole -- but no connoisseur of strangeness should miss the last installment. James Dean had the luckiest actor average, 4.0 for his three appearances. The Guide's tastes are pretty catholic past the fetish for black&whites; the introduction remarks that they get the most hate mail for giving Blade Runner one and a half stars (the lowest starred rating; standing in for just one is the colorful 'BOMB'). Brazil is given three.
I didn't have a job, didn't study and rarely socialized so I had time enough to see at least two movies a day. I remember staying up one night watching four four-stars, two quite long, for a total of something like ten hours. Two were A Touch of Evil and The Wild Bunch I believe. Each movie added immeasurably to my narrow world. I was never able to find about fifty of the 429, and skipped a number of others, mostly silent films, that failed to appeal. I lost interest in the Guide altogether around age 18 but still watched incessantly, often following leads my four-star movie list put me onto (I wrote them all out on two sheets of paper that still exist, water-stained in a drawer back in Ohio, with the ones I've seen circled), as often selecting based on favorite performers, directors, writers, or for being old, or new, or seeming different, or similar. I loved them, drank them. I even loved hating the ones I hated and being bored by the ones that bored me. But anyone reading this is media-soaked enough to have experienced the same thing. Movies are experience, to the young. They're additions, food for dreams, lathes for the ego and opinions. I resent how much time and energy I spent absorbing and pursuing them that could have been directed toward books, to reading all of Melville and Tolstoy at 16, George Eliot and Shelley at 17, Proust and Shakespeare at 18... imagine who I might be if I had, or if I'd somehow thrown over my comic books for them at ten... yet I see why I had to run out of what was in movies before I could get past them. Color and variety and speed and surprise jump-started my young mind. Uncommonly sharp and graceful speech and action, beautiful forms, foreign landscapes and languages, the moods and modes of work and war and love and divorce and old age and a thousand different pasts... all these. And most of all the unceasing, simple sublimities of human faces made of light, so vast and impossibly palpable in movie theaters... as if only ages after they ceased to exist could men see the gods; but so bright and compressed, so lavished with importance and detail on television screens... the toys of an infant czar.
It goes away, the heart of it, following the pattern of so many other hearts of things. It goes away and leaves just enough to remember it was there now and then. But you always love something. I startled myself, at 19 or 20, by starting to prefer movies based on plays, and further by suddenly preferring the text versions to the filmed. Plays got me into Shakespeare who got me into poetry and high literature in general, in one branch of which or other half my attention has been living since; and movies now are seldom more than interesting, pleasant.
And yet, far more than anything else was, they were my youth.
When I was about 16 I decided movies were the best thing in the world and set about seeing the best ones. I bought that year's copy of Leonard Maltin's Film and Video Guide and rented anything he gave a four star rating to (these numbered 429 at the time), as well as anything whose capsule description made it unmissable.
The Guide: The tastes of Maltin and his staff run toward older stuff, especially 1940s movies. A good rule of thumb is to subtract half a star from anything before 1960, actually. Among the four-stars there are comparative duds but I have to say every single one I saw was worth the seeing (except 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois). The Guide reviewers don't single out anything as the best film yet made, but I remember the rhetoric of praise being highest-pitched for Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Great Expectations (1946) and Modern Times. Further trivia: Alfred Hitchcock directed the most four-star films (Psycho + Foreign Correspondent + Rebecca + North by Northwest + Strangers on a Train + The Lady Vanishes + The 39 Steps + Vertigo + Rear Window = 9); his closest competitors were Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal + Wild Strawberries + Smiles of a Summer Night + Scenes from a Marriage + Fanny and Alexander + memory fails = 6?), Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows + Jules et Jim + Two Sisters + Small Change + Shoot the Piano Player + a 400 Blows sequel whose title escapes me = 6) and Steven Spielberg (E.T. + Jaws + Close Encounters of the Third Kind + Raiders of the Lost Ark + Schindler's List = 5); the highest directorial average goes to the guy who directed Zero pour Conduit and L'Atalante and then dropped dead; the former is also the shortest on the list. The longest was Rainer Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a fifteen-hour West German television miniseries, quite awful on the whole -- but no connoisseur of strangeness should miss the last installment. James Dean had the luckiest actor average, 4.0 for his three appearances. The Guide's tastes are pretty catholic past the fetish for black&whites; the introduction remarks that they get the most hate mail for giving Blade Runner one and a half stars (the lowest starred rating; standing in for just one is the colorful 'BOMB'). Brazil is given three.
I didn't have a job, didn't study and rarely socialized so I had time enough to see at least two movies a day. I remember staying up one night watching four four-stars, two quite long, for a total of something like ten hours. Two were A Touch of Evil and The Wild Bunch I believe. Each movie added immeasurably to my narrow world. I was never able to find about fifty of the 429, and skipped a number of others, mostly silent films, that failed to appeal. I lost interest in the Guide altogether around age 18 but still watched incessantly, often following leads my four-star movie list put me onto (I wrote them all out on two sheets of paper that still exist, water-stained in a drawer back in Ohio, with the ones I've seen circled), as often selecting based on favorite performers, directors, writers, or for being old, or new, or seeming different, or similar. I loved them, drank them. I even loved hating the ones I hated and being bored by the ones that bored me. But anyone reading this is media-soaked enough to have experienced the same thing. Movies are experience, to the young. They're additions, food for dreams, lathes for the ego and opinions. I resent how much time and energy I spent absorbing and pursuing them that could have been directed toward books, to reading all of Melville and Tolstoy at 16, George Eliot and Shelley at 17, Proust and Shakespeare at 18... imagine who I might be if I had, or if I'd somehow thrown over my comic books for them at ten... yet I see why I had to run out of what was in movies before I could get past them. Color and variety and speed and surprise jump-started my young mind. Uncommonly sharp and graceful speech and action, beautiful forms, foreign landscapes and languages, the moods and modes of work and war and love and divorce and old age and a thousand different pasts... all these. And most of all the unceasing, simple sublimities of human faces made of light, so vast and impossibly palpable in movie theaters... as if only ages after they ceased to exist could men see the gods; but so bright and compressed, so lavished with importance and detail on television screens... the toys of an infant czar.
It goes away, the heart of it, following the pattern of so many other hearts of things. It goes away and leaves just enough to remember it was there now and then. But you always love something. I startled myself, at 19 or 20, by starting to prefer movies based on plays, and further by suddenly preferring the text versions to the filmed. Plays got me into Shakespeare who got me into poetry and high literature in general, in one branch of which or other half my attention has been living since; and movies now are seldom more than interesting, pleasant.
And yet, far more than anything else was, they were my youth.
